And there was the problem of Callard. She’d need to get in fast with the Alice D. Thornborough if they came face to face. Be kind of interesting, she supposed, to see how Callard reacted to Kurt’s guest.
For reasons of perversity, Grayle had allowed Bobby to go on thinking she’d found Campbell intriguing, attractive, magnetic, all of that.
They drove through the castle gate. Cindy’s Honda was parked in the yard. She was relieved they’d gotten back.
Then she spotted Cindy himself waiting under the bulkhead light with Malcolm the dog.
Cindy looked bedraggled in his twinset and tweed skirt, truly the maiden aunt fallen on hard times. The truck’s headlights threw his face into hard relief: deep lines and no make-up, the mauve hair blown on end by the wind.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Bobby said.
XLIII
You could see Overcross Castle from a distance of maybe a mile, across countryside which would be lush in summer. Signs told of cider farms and a vineyard a few hundred yards and at least a whole season away. The light-green glaze of new growth on the trees looked like an illusion in the scrabbling wind.
‘I just knew it was gonna be like this.’ Inside the heaterless truck, Grayle rummaged in her bag for her long, woollen scarf.
The house had towers and turrets and battlements and all those other Son of Robin Hood features. Viewed through the spiky trees, it looked stark and threatening, more like a true medieval castle than any of the actual ones she’d seen. Made Marcus’s ruins look like garden ornaments. Behind it you could see, in the distance, the hill of Great Malvern with white houses and hotels strung along it like a necklace of teeth.
Billionaires in California had erected mock castles like this, and she’d marvelled at a couple when she was a kid and her father was lecturing out west.
But California was California and didn’t have the weather for it. Jesus, the first day of spring tomorrow, the vernal equinox, and was that snow on the truck’s windshield?
‘Bobby, is that snow?’
‘It’s not volcanic dust,’ Bobby Maiden said. He looked unhappy and unsure about everything.
As Grayle supposed they both were, since Cindy gave them the news about Marcus. The curse has come upon me, said the Lady of Shalott, Grayle thought drably. Wishing she was anyplace but here, as they came to an old brick wall, about ten feet high, with trees hard against it and a long sign along the top. Experience…THE FESTIVAL OF THE SPIRIT.
MARCH 20–25
And then a gatehouse. There was a cop on duty behind a barrier. Except, when he came over, Grayle saw he wasn’t a cop, although the uniform was damn close; Bobby thought so too, muttering something about take away the red armband and you could have him for impersonation. Bobby wound down the window and Grayle handed him the press passes she’d been given by Francine, Kurt Campbell’s haughty PA.
‘We also have a stall,’ she told the almost-cop, leaning across from the passenger side. ‘Stall thirty-eight?’
‘Hang on a moment.’ He studied the passes before pushing them back. He was a big young guy with an impassive, military kind of look, and Grayle saw the word FORCEFIELD on his red armband. ‘Bacton, is it? Somebody’s already there. Came about an hour ago.’
‘Yeah, we know.’
‘Right — Avenue Three. End of the drive, turn right by the tape and the arrows and you’ll see the way it’s divided — stalls one to fourteen, and so on. It’s your third, right at the end.’
‘Thank you, Constable.’ Bobby wound up the window. You could see an angry fire had been rekindled inside him, could almost smell the smoke.
‘Oh, I really don’t like the way you said that,’ Grayle said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘This is your private obsession taking over. At bottom, you’re just as bad as this guy Foxworth. You have a tenuous connection here between Campbell and this Riggs and Riggs is your personal bogeyman, so you’re thinking like maybe if you can build Seward into the picture … right?’
‘The only picture I’m getting’, Bobby said, ‘is Vic Clutton lying dead outside the house he was finally happy to call home.’
‘Oh boy.’ Grayle wound the big scarf around her neck and tightened the belt of her raincoat as the truck entered the grounds of Overcross Castle.
At close to eleven a.m. on a working day and the festival not due to open until that evening, there were probably fewer than a hundred people there — most of them around an expensive-looking restaurant marquee which, presumably, had heating, and was the only part of the site that looked remotely inviting.
The festival was set up in three sloping fields which might once have been parkland, leading up to the stone terrace surrounding Overcross Castle. Most of the hundred or so stalls were open-fronted display tents with room for about five people. One was being fitted out as an esoteric bookstore, another was figuring to sell aromatic candles which, with the wind and snow and all, nobody could hope to light.
They left Marcus’s faded blue truck next to Cindy’s Honda on a cindered parking lot reserved for stallholders. Hundreds of yards of wooden decking-track had been laid across grass which was destined otherwise to become a boot-churned bog.
Avenue Three was right under the highest part of the castle, a round tower with a conical roof and a lightning conductor which prodded the bruised low cloud like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe in a junkie’s arm. Stall thirty-eight marked the furthest point of the festival campus and was right next to the toilet block, a line of white Portaloos — already the source of a seriously acrimonious dispute, as Grayle and Bobby approached.
‘… don’t care if it was a late booking, this is not bloody good enough, is it, sonny?’
Young guy with a clipboard backing off. ‘Look, it’s the best we-’
‘Four yards … four yards … from the stinking toilets? Can you imagine the state those makeshift shithouses are going to be in by next Sunday? I mean, have you thought for one bloody second what this means, from our point of view? Well, I’ll tell you … It means that whenever anybody who’s been here comes across a copy of The Vision in future, they’re going to associate it immediately with the stink of stale piss and probably steaming vomit.’
‘Now look, those loos are the most hygienic-’
‘Makes no odds, sonny. By Saturday morning we’ll still all be swilling diarrhoea from the canvas.’
‘I can definitely assure you these toilets will be cleaned every-’
‘Pah!’ And Malcolm the dog barked once, as if in support.
‘Look, if you’ve got a complaint, you’ll have to put it in writing.’ The boy tucking his clipboard under his arm, turning away. Bad move, Grayle thought.
‘Don’t … think … you’re … walking … away … from … this.’ The force of nature in the glasses and the tweed suit, and the dog, advancing on the poor kid, planting a foot in front of his. ‘I want another site.’
‘I keep telling you, we haven’t got another site.’
‘In that case, I want two hundred pounds off the charge. Or I’ll be obliged to take this to Kurt bloody Campbell himself.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll show the smarmy bastard what a hypnotic trance feels like.’
‘Did you really say two hundred pounds?’
‘Seems eminently bloody reasonable to me. And I’m sure you wouldn’t like the good vibes to be soiled by the sound of me telling everyone, including the press and the local television, what a shoddy little sideshow this is, organized by a slimy tosser with no-’
‘All right!’ The kid held up both hands, dropping his clipboard in the mud. ‘I’ll go across to the admin office and see what I can do.’